In this article, I will investigate how Anton Szandor LaVey (1930–97), who founded the Church of Satan in 1966, constructed a Satanic tradition in his texts, and to what use he put it. James R. Lewis has discussed how Satanists in the Church of Satan, after LaVey's death, make reference to tradition. In that context, tradition is basically understood as the teaching established by their founder. What I shall look at here, however, is rather how LaVey himself makes ambiguous references to a supposed pre-existing Satanic tradition. I will present an interpretation of this based on LaVey's overall ontology, and his view of religious and esoteric phenomena.

In an esoteric context, tradition will typically be invoked to provide legitimacy, and there are, as Olav Hammer has shown, several ingrained esotericist strategies for doing this. Naturally, use of tradition as a means to create legitimacy is not the exclusive domain of esotericism or religion. Nations, universities, companies and so on use this strategy frequently. But several of LaVey's strategies for employing tradition harken back to approaches prevalent in Western esotericism, and are instantly recognizable to a scholar of such ideas. As will be shown, he both utilizes historical predecessors in a way that is common within Western esotericism in general, and breaks with this common usage in a way similar to what we can observe among Chaos Magicians.